Information technology (IT) support has grown from the days of merely keeping a computer network running. Today, IT serves as a backbone for an organization's entire business structure. For example, critical business processes now are operated by sophisticated computer networks and software. The execution of these critical business processes lie at the very heart of the day-to-day operations of an organization. In fact, many businesses rely on the IT to the extent that their business would cease to operate without a properly functioning IT system.
A natural consequence of this critical reliance on IT and its infrastructure has been an increased focus on IT monitoring and support services. The Capability Maturity Model (CMM) is a methodology that originally was developed to manage an organization's software development process. Its concepts also have been expanded to hardware management. The CMM model describes an evolutionary path of increasingly organized and systematically more mature processes designed to refine and optimize the IT development process. While CMM addresses software development maturity, another framework called IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) provided for operating infrastructure to support delivered software assets. ITIL processes help facilitate the implementation of a framework for IT service management. The ITIL framework allows for the creation of an IT service management structure that is customizable to the specific operation of a business that relies on an IT infrastructure.
ITIL has allowed for integration and communication among various IT systems that previously were isolated from each other. As a result, ITIL permits easier determination of the overall business impact of a particular hardware component or software application. For example, ITIL facilitates which departments in an organization or which services provided by an organization will be adversely impacted should a particular database server fail. Also, by quantifying the interrelationships among the various components or “configurable items” of an IT system, ITIL allows an IT system administrator to properly plan for additions and/or modifications to the IT system.
Yet, while ITIL provides these advantages, the integration of the operating infrastructure's configurable items to the organization's defined business processes remains elusive. Of course, an organizations business processes may be as varied and specific as the very business itself. As a result, in practice it is often difficult to trend incidents that occur on the network and identify a root cause of a particular problem. Therefore, there is a need to provide techniques that embrace an organization's particular business attributes, while conforming to accepted process frameworks and methodologies. It should be appreciated that the term network may be used to include a system environment, operating environment, and/or operating infrastructure.